Description [en]

As part of Team Caffeine, I was responsible for the engine, tool-chain, COLLADA Converter, and general gameplay scripting.

In essence, I was the Lead Programmer, in a team of five – two programmers, two artists and a producer/designer.

We took part in Dare to be Digital 2008 and you can see our team blog here.

Plight of The Weedunks was called a “puzzle-platformer” however, the bias as to which was puzzler and which was platformer was never really discussed a great deal. This caused a communication nightmare as we designed an engine primarily for small scale puzzle rooms, where the levels ended up being sprawling platform areas.

On the plus side, we managed to keep the polycount down low enough that in the end, it didn’t quite matter, and if it wasn’t for me chasing up imaginary bugs created from a dying workstation, we probably would have gotten a lot more done.

Using my Honours Project engine – SGZEngine – as a starting block, we then added ODE for Physics, Horde3D for 3D Graphics and modified their Collada Converter to pick up on the extra bits Maya adds to the FCOLLADA format.

Within just ten weeks, we had modified the engine and scripted a prototype game!

Although it doesn’t really match any of our visions of what the game was going to end up as, we are all extremely proud of what we produced in such a short amount of time, and even through some of the communication breakdowns we suffered.

We learned a great deal from the experience, and that’s exactly what Dare to be Digital is all about!

* The game needs 2 players, there is no 1 player mode.

* You must work together and use the character’s allergic reactions to Weedunks (little guys with the hammers) to get past obstacles and progress through the levels (though not really true for the first level – Toothy the Tunnel level – you just need to get to the very end in one piece!)